Dear Editor,
Immediately after the defeat of the Hollister School District
parcel tax, school board trustee Joe Navarro regrettably tried to
shift the responsibility to the media and to me personally. He is
obviously looking for a scapegoat; I’m writing to set the record
straight.
Dear Editor,
Immediately after the defeat of the Hollister School District parcel tax, school board Trustee Joe Navarro regrettably tried to shift the responsibility to the media and to me personally. He is obviously looking for a scapegoat; I’m writing to set the record straight.
Mr. Navarro claimed I wrote in a “large opinion editorial” that school employees were “hauling home fat paychecks.” Actually, it was my regular column and shorter than his letter to the editor. I wrote that most district employees were going to vote yes because they were “hauling home paychecks.” I may be fat, but the word fat was not in my column.
The point was that many of the taxpayers in the district have no paychecks at all and the employees, with Mr. Navarro’s support, had rejected their part of the deficit reduction plan.
I’m not sure that anything anyone might have said would have changed the outcome of the election considering the final vote. Historically, HSD’s certified salary and benefit costs have been way out of line with its income.
Last year the district finally lowered average salaries after almost a decade of overspending. Mr. Navarro deflects criticism for prior events by saying he has only been on the board since December 2010. He fails to mention that he spent a career teaching in the district where, as a self-described activist, he vigorously opposed every attempt to rein in out-of-control personnel costs. He is entitled to his position, but he cannot say he was merely a bystander to the district’s financial woes.
To reduce average salaries the district had to offer early retirement to at least 23 senior employees at the cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars; ironically, Mr. Navarro took advantage of that opportunity for himself. The buyouts will save money in the long-term, but they were not financial sacrifices, they were upfront payments.
When the district proposed the parcel tax, I met with the Superintendent and the Chairman of the ‘Yes on Measure A’ Committee and they presented the district’s deficit reduction plan. The largest single item by far was a $1.9 million item designated as “Other unspecified reductions.” They said they were going to get that from negotiated agreements with the employees.
That would have required the employees to give up $950,000 a year in salary and benefits for only two years – a cut of less than 3 percent – to supplement the total tax input of $5 million spread over four years from an economically strained public.
Obviously, if the district failed to get that agreement or otherwise save the $1.9 million, they would have to squeeze it from programs or divert the new tax revenues to pay existing costs. There are many ways to do that no matter how the ballot measure reads.
I gave the tax plan my conditional support, the condition was that they actually had an agreement to save the $1.9 million before the election. I said I would pay the tax although I was eligible for the senior exemption. The district failed to get the agreement and, therefore, failed to get my support.
Instead of encouraging the employees to make a deal, Mr. Navarro’s reaction, in his May 2011 blog, was, “I cannot blame school employee unions for not wanting to accept pay and benefit cuts.”
If the district did not intend to save that $1.9 million in negotiated agreements why were those ‘savings’ in the adopted plan and where were they going to come from? That is exactly the type of thing that sours the electorate – phantom savings that end up as more deficits and cuts.
Early on, the district’s election advisor conducted a survey that clearly showed a plurality of respondents were very unhappy with both the district’s quality of education and its direction.
Mr. Navarro was well aware of the widespread dissatisfaction, but he blamed the parents as he now blames the media and me. His blog observations of the March 8, 2011 School Board meeting include – “Many of the parents at the meeting were only concerned about their own children, while accusing us of not caring for children…” and “people expressed that they would oppose a parcel tax if they did not get their way…”
Mr. Navarro has chosen to use rhetoric and code words as arguments. I hope he decides that making accusations about political philosophy is not the way to get the district back on its feet. The public wants their children educated not used as pawns in political crusades.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. He writes a regular column for the Free Lance.
